On a serious note, I already mentioned recently (and indeed years back) that i'd get into the PS3 (and that whole gen, actually) when one of two games was released - The Last Guardian or Persona 5. Not that I had no interest in other games, just that those were the 2 exclusives I was most excited about and many other games could be played on multiple platforms.

Call me crazy, but I do actually see this game coming out, and I do think it will be spellbinding - there's fuck all to go on, obviously, other than an admittedly short track record, but that's my story and I'm sticking to it. I also think it will be the last Team Ico game - given the fact that at least one key member is now working on it on a freelance contract capacity and I expect the team will go after. But, should that be the case, and should it be good, it'll be a hell of a trilogy.

A lot has been written about both Ico and SotC so I shalln't ramble on too much. Suffice it to say I do find both games incredibly unique in their ability to use the player's physical input to enhance their commitment and immersion into the world. Having to hold down a button to drag Yorda along is, I believe, a moment of true design genius and that one simple input immediately elevates every other feature in the game. On a conceptual level - boy in hat, with stick, saving girl and swashing black phantoms away - it is sublime.

SotC is even more special, if that's possible. Many games can the whole are-you-the-bad-guy? card but few manage to bring a true sense of guilt and confliction to the table. Many games separate the gameplay and the story, and many only offer a "hard choice" in a binary sense - think Alpha Protocol's save the girl or stop the bomb - but in SotC the action and the choice are one and the same, without hand-holding or telegraphing, just a simple, continual metamorphosis for your character. Very few games truly manage this - one recent example of game where your choice, your input and your feeling have true synergy would be Papers, Please.

And that's kind of why I think this game will be something special. It's not that the team has a record of just creating great games , it's that in Ico and SotC they have a history of creating experiences that manage to perfectly reflect the feeling and tone of the piece by marrying it to the input and action - that's a real fucking talent to give players that feeling, like an art-house active reload.

Well put but I would add that Ico & SotC were also mechanically solid games.

Oh, aye, you're right about that, especially with Ico which is, to my mind, the more mechanically perfect of the two. SotC was solid in terms of control and input, sure, but it had some framerate issues - if it wasn't so special I'm sure a lot more people would have taken umbrage with that.

There was a decent piece in the most recent EDGE about a new Japanese startup who are working on their first title. The two guys are both European (Portuguese and Dutch) and have both worked under Ueda at Team Ico for the past decade (or close to).

I'd fucking love to hear what's been going on and what the final nail in the coffin was that got them to say "Fuck this noise".

Perhaps, but whatever it is, it might be a while before we know. For some reason, maybe to do with the way games are covered over there (don't know how many serious industry analysis mags and blogs they have, sure Brooks would know), maybe to do with the work/employment culture, I've noticed that you're far less likely to see a "what went wrong" style game development postmortem from a Japanese studio - everything seems to stay quite hush, hush.

When it comes to western devs, though, the stories of Colonial Marines, Duke Nukem Forever, and 38 studios are all stories where details have come out quite quickly after the event. Obviously there are exceptions, but i'd be surprised if, after TLG ships, the whole story comes flooding out.

I'd like to think Uedaware was sufficiently idiosyncratic to be resistant to expectation-creep and wouldn't need to be re-tooled to mesh with 2014's audiences in a way that both keeps the banks and the punters happy, but I'd also like to be able to levitate.

I'm also hoping the original plan for the game isn't something that'll look out of date just because a decade has ticked over. Ico would be fine as a new release today apart from the awful, awful, camera.

I dint think we can read too much into Ueda and key staff being elsewhere, by all accounts they actually finished the game, albeit with some ridicu-bug. It's gone to redundant parts of Team Japan to be fixed. I'd love to day that their import might not be missed, but having worked in an asshole (hahaha, I meant agile, but that fits too) environment, I've seen how easily new shot can be introduced and things drift away from fsd without strong leads

"I spent years thinking Yorke was legit Downs-ish disabled and could only achieve lucidity through song" - Mr B

They probably couldn't get it running at a decent framerate on PS3, so are retooling the whole damn thing for PS4.
Late 2015, maybe 2016 I reckon.
In years to come the post mortem will probably be a "Development Hell" casebook.